In January of this year, Taylor Swift released the music video for her chart-topping song Lavender Haze, which included transgender model Laith Ashley playing Swift’s love interest through the ‘hazy,’ cloudy, purple realm of the video. If you didn’t know Ashley to begin with, you likely would have never noticed; and yet the decision to include a transgender model — even if not the focal point of the video — is still a powerful political and social decision.
In one of our previous articles, I briefly broke down how transgender lives easily become a market scheme for elites to build platforms. These stories, more often than not, are focused on the suffering of transgender people: the exclusion one might face, the familial and platonic distancing, the unemployment, et cetera. But that is not the focus of Ashley’s inclusion in the Lavender Haze music video, and nor is in the point of various pieces of media where transgender people are represented and included but not made out to be the epitome of suffering. Transgender people can be who they are: they can have girlfriends, and go to parties, and do not have to exist in expulsion.
Transgender people can be who they are: they can have girlfriends, and go to parties, and do not have to exist in expulsion.
In the Lavender Haze music video, released in January, model Laith Ashley played the romantic lead opposed to Taylor Swift.
Swift is not the only artist who has been so directly involved in transgender inclusion and the fight for LGBTQ rights, but she is also one of the most prevalent in today’s view — Swift, who has maintained one of the top artists of 2023 and dominated the Top Music Billboard in the end of 2022, has a “fandom” (that is, a group of fans) of people who are openly queer, one of which she is an active ally for.
Other artists who do the same? The list is long and includes other notable figures like Beyonce, for example, who has proven herself to be a queer and trans ally time and time again. Certainly the list of artists who claim to be allies is even longer. Notable change, however, comes from movement — it comes from representation and action; action by these notable elites who can, and should, fight for true change above all else. And an example of that? Bad Bunny.
Like Swift, Bad Bunny maintained his legacy as an artist with the most-streamed album of 2022, Un Verano Sin Ti, but has for even longer been an ally to the transgender community. In 2020, Bad Bunny paid tribute to Alexa Negrón Luciano, a transgender woman who was murdered in Puerto Rico, when he wore to his performance on The Tonight Show a black skirt and a t-shirt stating: Mataron a Alexa, no a un hombre con falda.
They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt.
It takes open, honest allyship — openness to hiring transgender actors and models, openness to advocate, openness to fight — to make real change against all odds. We, as individuals, only hold so much power over the media, politics, and policing, but the artists, musicians, actors, and elites that we look up to can do so much more; and should.